Philosophy As A Lived Experience

In The Philosophy of Living Experience, Alexander Bogdanov summarises his philosophy of empiriomonism, situates it in the history of materialist thought, explains the social genesis of each stage of that history, and anticipates his ultimate achievement – universal organisational science.

The experience of illness is a universal and substantial part of human existence. Like death, illness raises important philosophical issues. But unlike death, illness, and in particular the experience of being ill, has received little philosophical attention. This may be because illness is often understood as a physiological process that falls within the domain of medical science, and is thus outside the purview of philosophy. In Phenomenology of Illness Havi Carel argues that the experience of illness has been wrongly neglected by philosophers and proposes to fill the lacuna. Phenomenology of Illness provides a distinctively philosophical account of illness. Using phenomenology, the philosophical method for first-person investigation, Carel explores how illness modifies the ill person's body, values, and world. The aim of Phenomenology of Illness is twofold: to contribute to the understanding of illness through the use of philosophy and to demonstrate the importance of illness for philosophy. Contra the philosophical tendency to resist thinking about illness, Carel proposes that illness is a philosophical tool. Through its pathologising effect, illness distances the ill person from taken for granted routines and habits and reveals aspects of human existence that normally go unnoticed. Phenomenology of Illness develops a phenomenological framework for illness and a systematic understanding of illness as a philosophical tool.

Max van Manen's Researching Lived Experience introduces a human science approach to research methodology in education and related fields. The book takes as its starting point the 'everyday lived experience' of human beings in educational situations. Rather than rely on abstract generalizations and theories in the traditional sense, the author offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation. First published in 1990, this book is a classic of social science methodology and phenomenological research. Researching Lived Experience offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material which forms the basis for textual reflections. The author discusses the part played by language in educational research; pays special attention to the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in research; and offers approaches to structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied.

Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy of lived experience as she actually wrote fiction. Hence Beauvoir should be placed among major philosophical novelists of the twentieth-century like Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and Beauvoir's theory of the metaphysical novel acknowledges multicultural traditions of story-telling and song which are not locked into the theoretical abstractions of the Greek philosophical tradition. In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr s, Arthur Rimbaud, Andr Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invit e, from the point of view of "other" women who appear on the fringes of Beauvoir's fiction: shop girls, seamstresses, and prostitutes. Holveck applies Beauvoir's philosophy to her own lived experience as a working-class teenager who grew up in jazz clubs similar to those Beauvoir herself visited in New York and Chicago.

This book explores the lived experience of being at home as well as being homeless. Being at home or not is typically a matter of being at a place or not, where such a place is carved out of space and designated as such. It is a place that is both empirical and trans-empirical. When one is at home or not at home, one typically has in mind an inhabited place. To inhabit or not to inhabit it is to find oneself in a place that has an affective presence or absence. In either case, affectivity points to a lived place where lived experience is constituted and displayed. Thus, in this context, affectivity becomes more than the subject of empirical psychology. If psychology were to have access, it would be in the context of phenomenological or existential psychology – a psychology that has its roots in the sensible world and, hence, a psychology that expresses an aesthetic dimension. Each of the contributors in this book extends an invitation to the readers to participate in constituting, extending, and sharing with others the sense of either being at home or of being homeless. This book appeals to students, researchers as well as general interest readers.

This book is an exploration of contemporary understanding from philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and metaphysical studies, which seem to verify the value of the Epicurean sentiments in terms of the wisdom of lived experience. It portrays the authoritarian culture of the Rome.

This volume provides Dilthey's most mature and best formulation of his Critique of Historical Reason. It begins with three "Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences," in which Dilthey refashions Husserlian concepts to describe the basic structures of consciousness relevant to historical understanding. The volume next presents the major 1910 work The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Here Dilthey considers the degree to which carriers of history--individuals, cultures, institutions, and communities--can be articulated as productive systems capable of generating value and meaning and of realizing purposes. Hegel's idea of objective spirit is reconceived in a more empirical form to designate the medium of commonality in which historical beings are immersed. Any universal claims about history need to be framed within the specific productive systems analyzed by the various human sciences. Dilthey's drafts for the Continuation of the Formation contain extensive discussions of the categories most important for our knowledge of historical life: meaning, value, purpose, time, and development. He also examines the contributions of autobiography to historical understanding and of biography to scientific history. The finest summary of Dilthey's views on hermeneutics can be found in "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life." Here, Dilthey differentiates understanding relative to three kinds of manifestations of life. After giving his analysis of elementary understanding, he examines the role of induction in higher understanding and interpretation, and the relevance of transposition and re-experiencing for grasping individuality.

For three years in a row, an international group of philosophers of education came together to reflect and promote a conception of philosophy as a lived experience. This book is a result of their discussions and makes an original contribution to the field. The book presents conceptual and critical works relevant to the current theoretical developments and debates within the fields of philosophy and education. The articles contribute both to philosophical clarifications and the advancement of research with solid arguments for theoretical and practical redirections. To deploy their arguments, the contributors draw on classical thinkers - such as Plato, Kant, and Dewey - and on contemporary prominent theorists - such as Derrida, Badiou, and Deleuze - with fresh and critical perspectives. (Series: Studies on Education - Vol. 3)